Colin Flint
Biographic Data
| ID | 3620779 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Colin Flint |
| GIVEN NAMES | Colin |
| FAMILY NAME | Flint |
| SIGNATURE | FLINT C |
| AFFILIATIONS | Pennsylvania State University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 60 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 451 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 57 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 3 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1993 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 12 |
Trump: Anomalía O Heraldo De Un Orden Geopolítico Nuevo
El objetivo de este foro de debate es entender si el gobierno de Donald Trump en los Estados Unidos es una anomalía en el orden geopolítico que nació tras la Guerra Fría o si anuncia un nuevo orden geopolítico. En la actualidad, el poder global se caracteriza por una transformación profunda en sus formas y actores. Ya no existe una única geometría de poder basada exclusivamente en la hegemonía de grandes potencias o en la clásica disputa de esfer…
Trump: Anomaly or Herald of a New Geopolitical Order
The aim of this discussion forum is to understand whether the Donald Trump administration in the United States is an anomaly in the geopolitical order that emerged after the Cold War or whether it heralds a new geopolitical order. Currently, global power is characterized by a profound transformation in its forms and actors. There is no longer a single geometry of power based exclusively on the hegemony of great powers or on the classic struggle f…
The relationality of geopolitical codes: The example of the Belt and Road Initiative
The concept of the geopolitical code is a useful tool to understand the multi-faceted nature of a country’s foreign policy, the way in which global patterns of geopolitics are an aggregation of geopolitical codes, and moments of geopolitical transition from one pattern of codes to another. We address the nature of geopolitical codes through the lens of instrumental and associative power, and the geography of its modalities. Especially, we conside…
Introduction to Geopolitics
This new updated edition presents the overarching themes of geopolitical structures and agents in an engaging and accessible manner, which requires no previous knowledge of theory or current affairs. It helps readers understand the geopolitical implications of COVID-19, China’s pronounced role in the world, the relative decline of the US, and the Black Lives Matter movement. Using new pertinent case studies and guided exercises, the title explain…
South-South Cooperation or Core-Periphery Contention? Ghanaian and Zambian Perceptions of Economic Relations with China
The geopolitics of development are explored through an examination of development assistance to two African countries as a mechanism of competition between China and the US. The processes of competition include the actions and rhetoric of African leaders. We define a geopolitical context for the agency of political leaders and opinion-makers in Ghana and Zambia. The geopolitical context consists of the structure and dynamics of the world-economy;…
Geopolitics at 25: An Editorial Journey through the Journal's History
Historical–Geopolitical Contexts and the Transformation of Chinese Foreign Policy
In the past few years, China has made dramatic foreign policy decisions that have changed both the global landscape and the behaviour of other states. To understand fully the possibilities and limitations of China’s foreign policy, it is important to see its occurrences within geopolitical contexts. The main argument of this article is that geopolitical context must be theorised in order to understand the decisions of states. We define a politica…
A world-systems approach to political geography
World-systems analysis is an approach that facilitates the exploration of political geography. Four key connections are: the concept of la longue durée facilitates the contextualization of events in long-term historical processes; the identification of ‘one society’ adopts a global view; critique of development frames the persistence of North–South differences in wealth and opportunity; and the Annales school’s call to look at culture and identit…
Cities as localities
Localities are places where we experience the effects of the world-economy and nation-state processes and where people act to try and change their world. Activities in localities interact with higher scales of the state and world-economy. Cities are a special type of locality, complex entities with diverse divisions of labour that are forever changing and growing. A world-city is a special type of city facilitating connections across the world-ec…
Geography of imperialisms
World-systems analysis emphasizes the material construction of functionalist spaces of formal empire, and conceptualizes imperialism within the structure and dynamics of the capitalist world-economy. Historic patterns of imperialism are mapped on to periods of the dynamic model of hegemony and rivalry, or the paired-Kondratieff model of hegemony. Descriptions of the periods of imperialism are divided into two sections, the first dealing with form…
Nation, nationalism and citizenship
The paradox of the doctrine of nationalism is explored to explain how it is, on the one hand, a powerful ideology that is used to motivate people to fight each other and is a fundamental part of our individual identity, while, on the other hand, the content of national identity is very weak. The heart of the paradox lies in the synthetic role of nationalism, or its ability to tie together the different institutions of the capitalist world-economy…
Political geography of democracy
The political geography of democracy is analysed through, primarily, a world-systems framework. The geography of elections and their tendency to be features of the core of the capitalist world-economy is noted, requiring a cautionary approach to current proclamations of a new wave of democratization. A world-systems explanation of the core-periphery geography of elections explains the different political geography of elections in both core and pe…
Prologue: Episodes in the life and times of a sub-discipline
Political geography is a sub-discipline within human geography, and was a key part of the formation of geography as an academic discipline in the late nineteenth century. The origins of political geography can be found in Friedrich Ratzel’s idea of the state as organism published in 1897. The British geographer Sir Halford Mackinder responded with his own ‘heartland model’ of geopolitics, which was followed by the work of another German geographe…
Geopolitics rampant
Geopolitical codes are described as the content and assumptions behind the foreign policy decisions of states and occur at three scales, local, regional and global. The aggregation of the geopolitical codes of all states creates a geopolitical world order. The most powerful state at any one time is called the hegemonic power and hegemony is a process of rise and fall of one state, commonly known as a great power. These cycles of hegemony contextu…
Epilogue: A political geography framework for understanding our twenty-first-century world
The seven themes of the book are re-visited: discerning the relationship between the material and the rhetorical; the geographical conceptualizing of politics; identifying weaknesses or ‘blindspots’ in analyses that focus on elites and fail to prioritize the gendered nature of politics; contextualizing events in space and time; placing events within the cyclical process of the rise and fall of great powers; evaluating localities or places as part…
Place and identity politics
The distinction between space and place is to analyse places as the locations of political struggle, especially as a site of identity politics, or the political struggle to obtain empowerment. Recognition of multiple identities has ignited political debates by problematizing the hegemony of traditional political identities, namely class and nation. The result has been a rise to prominence of identity politics as competition over the meaning and i…
Territorial states
The world-systems approach identifies the scale of the capitalist world-economy as the scope of social processes, and a multiple state system. This approach to states differs from other social science approaches that equate the state with society. The origins of modern states are explored through the use of a simple topological model of the state and discussion of key terms: sovereignty, territory, boundaries, capital cities and frontiers. This p…
Political Geography: World-Economy, Nation-State and Locality
The new and updated seventh edition of Political Geography once again shows itself fit to tackle a frequently and rapidly changing geopolitical landscape. It retains the intellectual clarity, rigour and vision of previous editions based upon its world-systems approach, and is complemented by the perspective of feminist geography. The book successfully integrates the complexity of individuals with the complexity of the world-economy by merging the…
State maneuver in the capitalist world-economy: A political geography of contextualized agency
The purpose of this paper is to elucidate a theoretical perspective and outline an analytical framework for state maneuver in the hierarchical world-economy that incorporates the idea of context with structural imperatives. Maneuver is the agency of states within conjunctures of structural imperatives and spatial settings of inter-state alliances and established cultural understandings and historic relations. The hierarchy of the capitalist world…
The Geopolitics of China's Maritime Silk Road Initiative
China’s “One Belt, One Road” project is comprised of two components: the Maritime Silk Road Initiative (MSRI) and the Silk Road Economic Belt (SREB)—that were announced separately in 2013. Each component has the potential to transform the global geopolitical landscape through the construction of interrelated infrastructure projects including ports, highways, railways and pipelines. Such hard infrastructure requires the complementary construction …
Reconstructing Conflict
Introduction to Geopolitics
This new updated edition of Introduction to Geopolitics presents the overarching themes of geopolitical structures and agents in an engaging and accessible manner, which requires no previous knowledge of theory or current affairs. Using new pertinent case studies and guided exercises the title explains the contemporary global power of the United States and the challenges it is facing, the persistence of nationalist conflicts, migration, cyberwar,…
Reconstructing Conflict: Integrating War and Post-War Geographies
The Multi-Disciplinary Reclamation of Geopolitics: New Opportunities and Challenges
The story of geopolitics may be described by the words of the Grateful Dead: “What a long, strange trip it’s been.” From being the driving force behind the establishment of geography as a modern university discipline through a false, but near fatal, association with Nazism, the common story is that it took Henry Kissinger, a refugee from Nazism, to resurrect the topic. Such a revival was partial. The geopolitics that Kissinger promoted was the pr…
Reading John Agnew and Luca Muscarà's Making Political Geography
Political Geography: World-Economy, Nation-State and Locality
The new and updated seventh edition of Political Geography once again shows itself fit to tackle a frequently and rapidly changing geopolitical landscape. It retains the intellectual clarity, rigour and vision of previous editions based upon its world-systems approach, and is complemented by the perspective of feminist geography. The book successfully integrates the complexity of individuals with the complexity of the world-economy by merging the…
Power, Place, and Militarism: Toward a Comparative Geographic Analysis of Militarization
The topics of militarism and militarization have acquired a position of prominence in geography, and the social sciences, in general, in recent years. This article begins by reviewing some of the major contributions to the study of war, peace, militarism, and militarization. Subsequently, it discusses three major strands of literature in geography and related fields: those of theories of place, cultural hegemony, and the ideological content of mi…
The Geography of the Nazi Vote: Context, Confession, and Class in the Reichstag Election of 1930
Competing theories of why voters in Weimar Germany chose the NSDAP (Nazi party) have been only partially supported; the notion of a "catch-all" party, with voters in different classes and social groups, is gaining adherents. Previous research has treated the German electrorate as a national unit. Regional and local elements of the voting surface have been generally ignored, even though strong historical and material conditions generated important…
The Geopolitics of China's Maritime Silk Road Initiative
China’s “One Belt, One Road” project is comprised of two components: the Maritime Silk Road Initiative (MSRI) and the Silk Road Economic Belt (SREB)—that were announced separately in 2013. Each component has the potential to transform the global geopolitical landscape through the construction of interrelated infrastructure projects including ports, highways, railways and pipelines. Such hard infrastructure requires the complementary construction …
Spatializing Social Networks: Using Social Network Analysis to Investigate Geographies of Gang Rivalry, Territoriality, and Violence in Los Angeles
Social network analysis is an increasingly prominent set of techniques used in a number of social sciences, but the use of the techniques of social network analysis in geography has been challenged because of a perceived lack of geographic nuance or consideration of spatialities of context in social networks. The concept of social position and the associated technique of structural equivalence in social network analysis are explored as a means to…
Embodying the garrison state? Everyday geographies of militarization in American society
The geography of war and peace: From Death Camps to Diplomats
Our world of increasing and varied conflicts is confusing and threatening to citizens of all countries, as they try to understand its causes and consequences. However, how and why war occurs, and peace is sustained, cannot be understood without realizing that those who make war and peace must negotiate a complex world political map of sovereign spaces, borders, networks of communication, access to nested geographic scales, and patterns of resourc…
Dying for a "P"? Some questions facing contemporary political geography
How the United States justified its war on terrorism: Prime morality and the construction of a ‘just war’
Just war theory has a long established reputation in the social sciences for evaluating the morality of the military actions of states. However, this analysis has rested upon assumptions of territorial sovereignty and the equal rights of states. The actions of hegemonic powers violate these twin assumptions through their expression of extra‐territorial reach. To avoid charges of immoral behaviour hegemonic powers must use the just war rhetoric of…
From militarization to securitization: Finding a concept that works
Just War and Extraterritoriality: The Popular Geopolitics of the United States' War on Iraq as Reflected in Newspapers of the Arab World
As with all wars, the U.S. military invasion of Iraq in 2003 needed to be portrayed as a just war in an attempt to garner support and legitimacy, domestically and internationally. The United States was acting as hegemonic power in the international state-system and, in light of this role, had imperatives and tools in creating the argument for a just war that differed from those used by nonhegemonic states. The United States acted extraterritorial…
Forming Electorates, Forging Spaces: The Nazi Party Vote and the Social Construction of Space
Using a social constructivist view of space, the agency of both the Nazi Party and the electorate created spatial contexts that, in turn, mediated future political activity. Spatial statistical analysis of aggregate voting data models the diffusion of Nazi Party electoral support across space as well as the construction of regionally specific electorates. The statistical concept of spatial dependence captures the creation of new spaces of power b…
Conceptualizing ConflictSpace: Toward a Geography of Relational Power and Embeddedness in the Analysis of Interstate Conflict
The concept of ConflictSpace facilitates the systematic analysis of interstate conflict data. Building on relational theories of power, we identify the spatiality of conflict as a combination of territorial and network embeddedness. The former is modeled through spatial analysis and the latter by social network analysis. A brief empirical example of the spread of World War I illustrates how the position of states within physical and network space…
A TimeSpace for electoral geography: Economic restructuring, political agency and the rise of the Nazi party
The relationality of geopolitical codes: The example of the Belt and Road Initiative
The concept of the geopolitical code is a useful tool to understand the multi-faceted nature of a country’s foreign policy, the way in which global patterns of geopolitics are an aggregation of geopolitical codes, and moments of geopolitical transition from one pattern of codes to another. We address the nature of geopolitical codes through the lens of instrumental and associative power, and the geography of its modalities. Especially, we conside…
Whither the individual, whither the context
Mapping the Dynamism of the United States' Geopolitical Code: The Geography of the State of the Union Speeches, 1988-2008
The changing geographical foci of the geopolitical code of the United States are examined by a content analysis of the presidential State of the Union Speeches between 1988 and 2008, the last year of President Reagan's term through the presidency of George W. Bush. The State of the Union speeches are interpreted as geopolitical discourse within a structural setting, using seven foreign-policy paradigms as an organising framework. The empirical fi…
South-South Cooperation or Core-Periphery Contention? Ghanaian and Zambian Perceptions of Economic Relations with China
The geopolitics of development are explored through an examination of development assistance to two African countries as a mechanism of competition between China and the US. The processes of competition include the actions and rhetoric of African leaders. We define a geopolitical context for the agency of political leaders and opinion-makers in Ghana and Zambia. The geopolitical context consists of the structure and dynamics of the world-economy;…
Historical–Geopolitical Contexts and the Transformation of Chinese Foreign Policy
In the past few years, China has made dramatic foreign policy decisions that have changed both the global landscape and the behaviour of other states. To understand fully the possibilities and limitations of China’s foreign policy, it is important to see its occurrences within geopolitical contexts. The main argument of this article is that geopolitical context must be theorised in order to understand the decisions of states. We define a politica…
The Multi-Disciplinary Reclamation of Geopolitics: New Opportunities and Challenges
The story of geopolitics may be described by the words of the Grateful Dead: “What a long, strange trip it’s been.” From being the driving force behind the establishment of geography as a modern university discipline through a false, but near fatal, association with Nazism, the common story is that it took Henry Kissinger, a refugee from Nazism, to resurrect the topic. Such a revival was partial. The geopolitics that Kissinger promoted was the pr…
Cities, War, and Terrorism: Towards an Urban Geopolitics
The geopolitics of laughter and forgetting: A world-systems interpretation of the post-modern geopolitical condition1
Scholars have noted a recent transition from modern to post‐modern geopolitics. Deterritorialisation is the defining feature of the new geopolitical condition. The purpose of this article is to outline a world‐systems theory interpretation of the processes of deterritorialisation. World‐systems makes three contributions: the core/periphery of the world‐economy explains the geographic pattern of deterritorialisation, hegemonic cycles explain the t…
State maneuver in the capitalist world-economy: A political geography of contextualized agency
The purpose of this paper is to elucidate a theoretical perspective and outline an analytical framework for state maneuver in the hierarchical world-economy that incorporates the idea of context with structural imperatives. Maneuver is the agency of states within conjunctures of structural imperatives and spatial settings of inter-state alliances and established cultural understandings and historic relations. The hierarchy of the capitalist world…
A Relational Geography of War: Actor–Context Interaction and the Spread of World War I
Claims by geographers that the geopolitical context of international politics matters requires that context be defined and operationalized in a way that enables analyses illustrating that actors' behavior varies across different contextual settings. A geographic understanding of embeddedness and relational power is meshed with a well-established contextual theory of international politics to create an operationalization of context that helps to e…
The Geography of Insurgency
In recent years geographers and scholars from other disciplines have made substantial contributions to the literature on political violence, civil war and conflict within states through asking spatial questions: where is conflict likely to occur and how will it spread or diffuse? In this article, we provide a survey of the approaches, theories and methodologies used to address these questions and suggest avenues for advancing the spatial analysis…
VII. Back to front? The existence and threat of extremism in English nationalism
The Geography of the Nazi Vote: Context, Confession, and Class in the Reichstag Election of 1930
Competing theories of why voters in Weimar Germany chose the NSDAP (Nazi party) have been only partially supported; the notion of a "catch-all" party, with voters in different classes and social groups, is gaining adherents. Previous research has treated the German electrorate as a national unit. Regional and local elements of the voting surface have been generally ignored, even though strong historical and material conditions generated important…
Political behavior and the local context
Reply to Robert A. Muller
Whither the individual, whither the context
Structure, Agency, and Context: The Contributions of Geography to World-Systems Analysis
The interaction of geography and world-systems theory has created two groups of work. The first body of work uses world-systems theory as its theoretical framework with minor levels of critique or change. The second body of work attempts to inform world- systems theory by explicitly including a geographical perspective. Human geographers attracted to world-systems theory provide a perspective that highlights the role of agency in what is widely p…
Forming Electorates, Forging Spaces: The Nazi Party Vote and the Social Construction of Space
Using a social constructivist view of space, the agency of both the Nazi Party and the electorate created spatial contexts that, in turn, mediated future political activity. Spatial statistical analysis of aggregate voting data models the diffusion of Nazi Party electoral support across space as well as the construction of regionally specific electorates. The statistical concept of spatial dependence captures the creation of new spaces of power b…
Electoral geography and the social construction of space: The example of the Nazi party in Baden, 1924–1932
A TimeSpace for electoral geography: Economic restructuring, political agency and the rise of the Nazi party
Right-wing resistance to the process of American hegemony: The changing political geography of nativism in Pennsylvania, 1920-1998
The geopolitics of laughter and forgetting: A world-systems interpretation of the post-modern geopolitical condition1
Scholars have noted a recent transition from modern to post‐modern geopolitics. Deterritorialisation is the defining feature of the new geopolitical condition. The purpose of this article is to outline a world‐systems theory interpretation of the processes of deterritorialisation. World‐systems makes three contributions: the core/periphery of the world‐economy explains the geographic pattern of deterritorialisation, hegemonic cycles explain the t…
The Theoretical and Methodological Utility of Space and Spatial Statistics for Historical Studies: The Nazi Party in Geographic Context
The geographic perspective on human behavior emphasizes the notion of context. Context suggests that human behavior is partly determined by the place in which individuals and groups act, and in turn these actions re-create places. It follows that an element of history is the contextual setting of activity. Spatial statistics are introduced as a tool for modeling context in historical studies. Spatial dependence serves to operationalize the specif…
Spaces of Hate: Geographies of Discrimination and Intolerance in the U.S.A
Introduction: Spaces of Hate: Geographies of hate and intolerance in the United States of America - Colin Flint 1. One Social Milieu, Paradoxical Responses: A Geographical Re-Examination of the Ku Klux Klan and the Daughters of the American Revolution in the Early Twentieth Century - Carol Medlicott 2. The Geography of Racial Activism: Defining Whiteness at Multiple Scales - Kathleen M. Blee 3. House Bound: Women's Agency in White Separatist Move…
From Votes to Seats: The Operation of the U.K. Electoral System since 1945
Key Words: electoral geographyelectoral systemsredistrictingUnited Kingdom Additional informationNotes on contributorsColin FlintReviewed by
Dying for a "P"? Some questions facing contemporary political geography
How the United States justified its war on terrorism: Prime morality and the construction of a ‘just war’
Just war theory has a long established reputation in the social sciences for evaluating the morality of the military actions of states. However, this analysis has rested upon assumptions of territorial sovereignty and the equal rights of states. The actions of hegemonic powers violate these twin assumptions through their expression of extra‐territorial reach. To avoid charges of immoral behaviour hegemonic powers must use the just war rhetoric of…
On the Fault Line: Race, Class, and the American Patriot Movement
Key Words: social movementsKentucky militiapolitical rhetoricgeographic scale Additional informationNotes on contributorsColin FlintReviewed by
The geography of war and peace: From Death Camps to Diplomats
Our world of increasing and varied conflicts is confusing and threatening to citizens of all countries, as they try to understand its causes and consequences. However, how and why war occurs, and peace is sustained, cannot be understood without realizing that those who make war and peace must negotiate a complex world political map of sovereign spaces, borders, networks of communication, access to nested geographic scales, and patterns of resourc…
Introduction to Geopolitics
This clear and concise introductory textbook guides students through their first engagement with geopolitics. It offers a clear framework for understanding contemporary conflicts by showing how geography provides opportunities and limits upon the actions of countries, national groups, and terrorist organizations, and the overarching theme of geopolitical structures and agents requires no previous knowledge of theory or current affairs. Throughout…
Cities, War, and Terrorism: Towards an Urban Geopolitics
Just War and Extraterritoriality: The Popular Geopolitics of the United States' War on Iraq as Reflected in Newspapers of the Arab World
As with all wars, the U.S. military invasion of Iraq in 2003 needed to be portrayed as a just war in an attempt to garner support and legitimacy, domestically and internationally. The United States was acting as hegemonic power in the international state-system and, in light of this role, had imperatives and tools in creating the argument for a just war that differed from those used by nonhegemonic states. The United States acted extraterritorial…
Introduction to geopolitics
Violent Geographies: Fear, Terror, and Political Violence by Derek Gregory and Allan Pred
This book marks a struggle against misinformation and a struggle to create and disseminate knowledge. Of the eighteen chapters that follow the introduction, sixteen discuss political violence enact
The need to recognize the limits of the state to recognize the limits of community: A friendly critique of Steve Herbert's Citizens, Cops, and Power
Conceptualizing ConflictSpace: Toward a Geography of Relational Power and Embeddedness in the Analysis of Interstate Conflict
The concept of ConflictSpace facilitates the systematic analysis of interstate conflict data. Building on relational theories of power, we identify the spatiality of conflict as a combination of territorial and network embeddedness. The former is modeled through spatial analysis and the latter by social network analysis. A brief empirical example of the spread of World War I illustrates how the position of states within physical and network space…
Political science (47 works) · Politics (40 works) · Law (36 works) · Sociology (35 works) · Geography (27 works) · Political economy (20 works) · Geopolitics (17 works) · Economic geography (15 works) · Economics (12 works) · Political geography (12 works)